“I’ve been a forced member of this cult for 10 years”

Here’s some testimony against “the Way” that I compiled from messages that were recently sent to me by a young lady I’ll call “M”. She asked that I mask her name and location, but I can say that she’s from a country somewhere in the southern hemisphere.

I’ve been a forced member of this cult for 10 years. My parents became members since I was a baby. I grew around it and I’ve seen how they play with the lives of this people how they control their thoughts.

My family is keeping me from leaving, [but] once I move out of my parents house I won’t get near them. I live in XXXXX; it was considered the most dangerous city in the world, so it’s not very easy to just move out when you already have a very safe place to live, thank God. So as much as I despise the Way I’m stuck there for some months, it won’t be too long.

I must add I don’t consider myself part of it. On my last convivence the leader of the community (called a “responsible”) called me out for not caring about it, using my phone and taking his peace away.

Sorry if I write too much, there’s a lot for me to say about it, I’ve seen and heard so much over this 10 years, the Way hasn’t had it very easy in my church, a couple of priests don’t like it. Two of them told me that directly.

I’ve seen my family change specially my mother and sister, they have no friends and no life outside “the Way” they are obsessed with “the Way” in a very scary and irritating way. My mother even blackmails me into going. The weak minds get lost in “the Way” they are twisted and they always gather and talk about Kiko, they truly put this man on pedestal.

All the marriages complain about their spouses theyhumiliate each other at the convivence I see how they suffer and how they still believe deeply that they’re each other’s crosses bound to make each other suffer to gain salvation because that’s what Kiko teaches about your own Cross, another terrible misconception and lie.

I was forced to join one community. 2 or 3 years later the Bishop forbid the Way to start new communities, he didn’t like the Way. Of course the catechist would always say it was persecution within the church, but people keep leaving including the catechists. One of them left his wife and has a new family, another one left the city, and the leader of the catechist crew left the country with no notice, leaving the burden to a pair of old guys who can barely speak in public.

I hear over and over how the people refer to their spouses as being each other’s crosses. They humiliate each other. There is one couple I feel very sorry for, the wife always cries and talks about how terrible her husband is to her, about how she judges him and how he humiliates her with the way he acts, she said she knew everyone outside the Way would advise her to divorce him.

A woman once talked about how she lost her pregnancy and how the priest (a priest from the Way) told her she should keep the baby inside her although her doctor said her life was at risk. [was the baby alive or dead?]

I was humiliated by the leader of the community because I don’t talk about my personal life, he tried to force me into “sharing my life”, and he even told me the devil was using me against him.

Catechists humiliate and tell people how to live their lives. They told a guy once to quit his job because it made him miss the itinerary of the community, they ask about the couples’ sex lives. They tell young couples to get married and to marry a “son of Israel” (someone from the Way). A woman had to leave the Way because she was forced to try again and again to go back to her abusive ex-husband who had remarried already. The “anuncios” are always about praising Kiko Arguello, they speak about things he says and things he does.

I’ve seen how it has affected my family. They have no social life outside the Way, they would even stop going to a family reunion if they have to. They get very defensive about it, it got to a point where I was being blackmailed to go, it still is like that actually. I can tell how they think differently about a normal Catholic Mass, they think less of it. People from the Way believe that their way is better than the rest of the Catholic Church, as if they are the only ones being saved. And that is what they make people believe especially those with weak personality who get sucked into it.

"Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know Himself..." Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 1998